Stephen Dobyns has a fine book of ekphrastic Balthus poems (titled The Balthus Poems) and has a number of Cezanne poems in Cemetery Nights.
William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Breughel are fine examples from the Modernist era. Here's one:
The Parable of the Blind
This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red
in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading
each other diagonally downward
across the canvas
from one side
to stumble finally into a bog
where the picture
and the composition ends back
of which no seeing man
is represented the unshaven
features of the des-
titute with their few
pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
cottage is seen and a church spire
the faces are raised
as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous
to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster
—William Carlos Williams
In her book The Philosopher's Club, Kim Addonizio has a strong poem about a photograph of victims of the Holocaust.
Then there is this famous one by Frank O'Hara based on Michael Goldber's "Sardines":
Why I Am Not a Painter
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting called SARDINES
―Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
There is Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It"
Facing It
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way―the stone lets me go.
I turn that way―I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare. The sky.
A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
―Yusef Komunyakaa
[from Dien Cai Dau, Wesleyan UP]
Photo missing here. see below.
And there are so many more good ones!
Best, Tony
Edited in by Janice. Tony, I am very sorry to have removed your photo of the Vietnam Memorial that accompanied the Komunyakaa poem, also the Parable of the Blind by Breughel accompanying the William Carlos Williams poem. They stretched the thread and made it impossible to read without scrolling back and forth on each and every post.
May I suggest that you enter the photo as a link OR as an attachment. See how to add attachments under Additional Options below this thread. If you need help, contact me and tell me where to find the photo and I'll do my best to assist you.
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